A Good Day

Today has been a lovely day! I am so pleased! I have managed to drag out a lot of old notes on philosophy and ethics, academic notes and the articles and reports I have for analysis and now I have them in neat piles ready to read... There is so much there! This is great because it means it shouldn;t take soooooooooo awfully long to get through... I would say maybe a week? And then a week of really good writing? I have an order of reading for them and a couple of other articles I may need to dip into... Later today I read through what I have already (again, I know) and thought it was really too light on analysis, looked into my MRes dissertation and woo! A whole chapter of analysis! Copy and paste, thank-you-very-much and ta da, I have 6000 words of my chapter down! Granted they are bad words, in a bit of a jumble and will be drastically cut back but they are a fabulous template to start with. Hurray!

So I feel quite relaxed and in control this evening.

I have just eaten a load of pineapple and have a really sore tongue...

And I went for a swim! A good, hard swim that I really enjoyed. Got a bit bored though. I know I should progress from the 45 minute threshold I have at the mo but up-and-down, up-and-down is pretty tedious.

All round then, a successful day.

I am quite interested by the fact that a march was held in London the other day about the stabbing of a young chap who was minding his own business... It's on the tv and they are all white. White faces all round. This concern is rising all the time - this guy's death is talked of as the 17th stabbing of a young man in London... But all these stabbings are completely unrelated to each other. But lumped together, discursively they can be used to represent something much more sinister. There is also a very bad habit of calling any group of black kids, or youths in 'hoodies' (am proudly sporting mine now...) a 'gang' - it is general vernacular in the media now because it is used to apparently innocently denote a 'group' but really it infers to a predatory, aggressive group of young men who rule a particular region with their own laws and violence. This term strikes fear in the heart of middle England and is used willy-nilly to encourage and escalate this fear. And then, what do you know, you have police now able to stop-and-search anyone who is 'acting suspiciously' or fits a certain profile of a particular kind of knife-carrier... I.e. black, poor, young, disaffected. This discrimination is used to too often as a weapon to humiliate gobby, irritated kids by white police officers in front of their friends - these searches are rough and accompanied by too much aggro. Who wouldn't be pis*ed off being treated like that? Who wouldn't feel marginalised, hopeless, disliked? It is unfair. What is this going to achieve but make a whole group of 'problem' kids more of a problem?

I worry, I really do. I can't see the logic.

x J